By Buster McNutt
What do electric-car drivers, bicycle riders, and road kill have in common? They are all using gasoline-tax-paid-for roads without paying any taxes! Now road kill I can almost forgive, because they are just using the road as a final staging area until the vultures get out of their meetings and get back on the clock. Obviously it would be difficult to do a whole lot to them to get them to pay taxes. But the other two are just taking money out of our pockets and going about their twisted, spandex, tree-hugging ways. This is theft, just as it would be if you were an illegal alien or possibly a trained circus elephant drinking water from a public water fountain that our taxes paid for. And some can be double-dipper freeloaders, as when an electric car runs over a pre-road kill animal. Where is that Tea Bag Party when we really need them?
I don’t know how your roads are, but around here we have potholes so big you could toss a liner in and have a pretty decent swimming hole. We actually had a sinkhole disappear into a pothole. We have bridges in such bad shape that the only company that would bid on replacing them was Lego.
Bicycle riders using public roads should all be rounded up and sent to China where that is considered perfectly normal, but then so is throwing an Allegro Hot and Spicy marinated cat or dog on the barbie before watching the weekend PCC (Professional Chinese Checkers) match on TV. Maybe we could do a deal with the Chinese to get them to weigh each bike and rider and send us the equivalent weight of asphalt, which would go a long way toward repairing our roads, and just maybe paving a certain dirt road that just happens to be in front of my house. Getting bicycle riders off the roads would also create thousands of jobs, since we’d need to paint over all those bike lane stripes. I’m thinking this would more than offset job losses at bike shops, most of which are probably well on the way to converting to medical/recreational marijuana stores/farms anyway. I mean, have you ever really looked at the kind of people who work at bike shops?
For electric cars and trucks we need a substitute for the gas tax. I’m thinking we take the average miles driven by real working Americans each year, divide it by the average miles per gallon for same year cars, and then charge the electric car owners whatever the federal/state gas taxes are in that state. We’d double that in states where the electricity they use to recharge the cars comes from coal plants, partially to account for the extra “carbon footprint” but mostly because we can. And we’d do away with any tax “credits” when they purchase an electric car, unless maybe the electricity they use comes from electric plants powered by windmills or decaying plant matter or animal droppings, or some combination of the above. That would only be fair.
Maybe we should consider not building any more roads for a few years. There is no one in America who has a house or an apartment or a double-wide who does not have a road leading up to that structure. Except maybe in Alaska where they use dog sleds. Hmmmm … Maybe we should put wheels on dog sleds and sell them throughout the country to the same people who are buying electric cars now. Hug a tree; hug a dog — what’s the difference? And maybe we don’t paint over the bike lanes; we just change them to “sled lanes”! Those same unemployed bike shop people can now be retrained to be sled-lane pooper-scoopers. It’s not like it would require a college degree or anything. They could even keep the “doggy residue” and share it with their former coworkers who are now working on the medical/recreational marijuana farms. It would be great fertilizer, unless it came from those nasty little ankle-biting designer frou-frou dogs, most of which were owned by the former bike riders. Maybe we could sweeten the deal to the Chinese and throw those dogs in with the bikes and riders. Supposedly they are lean and high in protein… (Note to self: Get a bigger mailbox to hold all the letters from the ankle-biting-dog lovers.)
Of course we’d have to make a few accommodations for the dog sleds, getting them to actually stop at stop signs comes to mind. My plan for that would be that at each stop sign we’d put a fake fire hydrant, or maybe a mail carrier’s leg, also probably artificial. And we’d need “fuel stations” for the sled dogs. I’m thinking every couple miles or so we build a McFidos fast dog food location. The dogs would enter the sled-thru lane, stop at the window and be served their choice of a MacBone or Quarter Pounder Table Scraper, or maybe even a Lappy Meal, which could also include a kitty cat chew toy. Maybe for the evening meal they could have a Lappy Hour, with two-for-one dog treats and big-screen TVs showing reruns of “Lassie,” “Rin Tin Tin,” and “Deputy Dawg.” The “comfort station” would be a couple dozen bike wheels, which somehow seems appropriate.
Thinking back to the road kill on public roads, while we can’t tax road kill, I’d think a case could be made for taxing the vultures, since they are deriving a definite benefit from the slacker, tax-avoiding road kill. But I’m pretty sure that President Trump would veto any tax on vultures for the same reason that sharks won’t eat lawyers.
Professional courtesy. •
